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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

Same I just was talking with my daughter (16) about this because she hated her intro programming class in high school. No biggie if it isn't for her, slightly disappointing that I can't share knowledge, but she should pursue what she enjoys.

What irked me was she claimed "I just hate being on the computer", but her screen time on the phone easily crests 8 hours daily. Maybe we are just entering a similar phase to auto mechanics. In the 1950s anyone who owned a car was at least somewhat proficient in its inner workings, now many people need to consult the manual to figure out how to pop their hood.

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There's a reason for that. I ran across a video recently that talked about how his dad would replace an engine over the weekend. But then he showed what the old cars looked like under the hood (very simple with lots of empty space) and new cars (very complicated). More importantly, he showed the manuals that came with the car. The old car's manual showed how the engine was put together and explained what everything did, and how to rebuild it. The new manual was only full of warnings and told you to take it to the dealer for everything.

Think about how I (and probably you) learned computers. My IBM PC has a manual that has a page just to show where the power switch is and how to use your hand to flip it. It has a diagram for what the keyboard cable looks like when it's plugged in correctly. It continues on and on and tells you how to open it and what the dip switch settings do. People always thought I was a computer wiz kid when I all I ever did was read the manuals and try out what they said.

Same. I learned to code as a kid by reading the manual that came with my brother's TRS-80 Model 100 "laptop". The manual contained a complete documentation of the BASIC language that came on the computer. The computer itself, other than a couple simple built-in note-taking and calendar programs, was mainly designed for you to write your own programs for your own use. I remember the first time when I was 8 years old that I got past IF and GOTO and figured out what an array was. Suddenly all kinds of things were possible.

I think the crucial missing thing is being locked into undivided boredom. My mom would be getting her afternoon nap and I couldn't go anywhere so I just walked around the house, opened drawers and cabinets and boxes with old parts, magnets and whatnot and experimented with them. With zero distractions, no internet, no mobile phone, nothing. So either read a book (I read mine many times over) or tinker away. And I am still tinkering, just with software instead, while getting paid for it.

"Boredom is the fount of learning and creativity"

But, you must have tools. Some kind of tools.

I grew up in the 80s and we were strictly forbidden from watching TV. There were no video games in the house. I only got to see Nintendo at friends houses... and I barely understood how they could get through level after level. Tabletop RPGs were also forbidden. Encouraged: building stuff out of sticks and mud or whatever was in the yard, mandatory reading of history books, chess. In the 80s, my parents viewed computing with equal suspicion to video games. I had to really make a case that what I was doing with BASIC and Pascal and later Hypercard was educational for me... and even then I was restricted to 1 hour per day on the family computer. But I had this 16K TRS80-100 that no one considered a game or a threat... and I was already dialing BBSs at 300 baud and getting kicked off after the parents were asleep.

Um. So I've told this all to friends and girlfriends, and often they say "oh wow you were really abused" or something. I don't really fault my parents, I think it was good for me and my siblings in the end. But boredom is not the thing. Limited resources is the thing. Give a mind the ability to make the most of limited resources, and the mind will always find things of interest to stave off boredom. Boredom is the province of those with nothing to think about when not being stimulated. That's why "people who get bored are boring," as my ex used to say.

> Limited resources is the thing

I think that is true. When we didn't have access to a proper football at school, we took used notebook papers, made a ball out of it, put that in several layers of small plastic bags (for water proofing) and tightened that in with a thick string looped to cover the surface. It served perfectly as football for a bunch of noisy kids and was easily replaceable.

Paucity provides the spark for creativity.

There's definitely some truth to that. Consider the demoscene, where wildly creative stuff is typical made under certain limitations. For example, demos where the executable + resources is only 64kb [0] or 4kb [1] are often full of surprising creativity. That and of course demos made for primitive systems (by today's standards) like C64 [2] or Commodore Amiga [3].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCjSG_15kcw

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCmUIcdG5wo

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqnZH7Pa3vo

Yep. When I was playing around with Linux, it was pretty much “spend all the time in the world editing config files until things work.” It’s a much different ballgame when you can’t google your boot errors because the only thing that can connect to the internet won’t boot, even when it does you’ll have to futz around in kernel driver source code for your particular brand of external modem, and finally once you’re online Google doesn’t even exist but at least you don’t need it anymore!

I learned BASIC to screw with the demo computers at Sears and setup print loops.

The empty space in older cars is definitely a big contributer to how much simpler it was to work on them. Plenty of project cars I owned or worked on that had more than enough room in the engine bay to actually STAND inside between the frame and engine with the engine / wiring / hoses still present and both feet planted on the ground.

Much less daunting and convenient to work on an engine or replace a part when you don't have to take off (and potentially break) a million other parts to get at what you want to replace and you actually have the room to see what you're doing instead of blindly groping around for something vaguely shaped like something you've only seen a picture of.

That and the absolute sheer amount of electronics in modern cars. Older cars had the absolute bear minimal amount of wiring to the point that it was entirely plausible to more or less keep the wiring schematic in your head and even (speaking from experience) redo the entire wiring harness front to back on your own with a few different colored rolls of wire from a hardware store yourself.

I can't imagine how people getting into the hobby now with newer cars feel looking at the unholy mess of endless amounts of wiring, sensors, mechanical parts all jammed together in tightly packed space efficient layouts probably designed by someone purely working on them in a digital space. On the bright side at least they have youtube and better resources on the Internet to look up how to actually do something though.

It’s definitely hard(er). I’ve found it’s impossible to get any diagrams or (repair shop) manuals for some dirt-common 2000s/early 2010s vehicles, and have been forced to play many a game of ‘trace the wire.’

That's true but YouTube has been a godsend. There's been some mid 2000s cars owned by family or friends I've helped them with (including a transmission swap) where we weren't able to get an entirely satisfactory answer from a service or repair manual but we were almost always able to find several hour videos of random guys on YouTube willing to talk their way through even fairly major jobs and even mention hangups/practical advice for doing it the way the manual wouldn't tell you to but will make the job easier in a home garage setting.

I’m comfortable doing mechanical work and when my Honda Fit said I had to remove a shitload of parts just to replace a spark plug I said fuck it and traded it in.

My brother had to have something (AC fan?) replaced and it involved removing the entire dash. I've seen photos of this and it looks like the car exploded.

Some fan in my (late 90s) Taurus wagon was buried behind a bunch of stuff in the engine area and while we didn’t have to take out the whole block, it was still pretty dense and a lot had to move and come out to replace it. And that’s still relatively “simple” compared to today’s cars.

In comparison my 80’s Bronco II, I bought it from my neighbor for $300 and my dad told me I’d fix whatever broke myself if I could. Gave me a service manual that had schematics and layouts of just about every part of that car that was serviceable, and the book wasn’t even that thick considering what it detailed. I was able to pin out some repurposed Christmas lights for the dash in a pinch, and we tore down and rebuilt some component from under the hood ourselves though I don’t recall exactly what now.

Friend has a Fiat 500 which had to have the engine removed to access the AC compressor to change it. Cost her $3000. Mostly labor.

I've had a knee-jerk reaction to that job too. But realistically optimizing spark plug changes isn't really important like the old days where you needed to change them every 10k miles or less. It's maybe 2-3 times in the entire life of the car.

Removing the wipers and windshield cowl is generally easy, just takes some extra time. Dealers/mechanics charge for time, not difficulty. So that simple 2hr job can easily be 500-600+. Still something that could be a rewarding Saturday morning project for someone who likes doing DIY type stuff.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/r9lfqt/install...

Idk man seems like plenty of space to me. Also comes with service mode which shows all the inner working and status of components:

https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/2046/tesla-service-mode-ho...

There's basically nothing you can even work on in there though.

Rich Benoit would disagree

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuAMczraBIM

It's definitely not a hard and fast rule for everything. You'll find older cars with head scratching design and poor engine bays. And newer cars with more room and sensible design than you'd expect. But as a general rule from experience the exceptions seem to be mostly outliers.

Not sure how fair of a comparison that is given how much of what makes that vehicle go is not in that bay, but an example more of what he's talking about...

A relative drives an old truck. This is more or less his engine bay: https://www.onallcylinders.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ch...

I've walked into his garage and found him inside the engine bay with a stool, sitting down and working on something.

Where-as I drive a newer car, and this is similar to mine: https://i.redd.it/4ks75mma4pmb1.jpg

My Prius requires a proprietary tool to change the oil.

I think a lot of the older cars either came with or were easier to buy the shop manuals. Those will tell you how to do basically everything. You can still get them for modern cars, but they're $100-250. Even then, many procedures require specialized equipment that most individuals do not have.

In some cases you can't even buy them anymore, they want a bloody digital subscription.

I am very fortunate that my local library maintains digital access to useful stuff.

I was stunned to see that Haynes went to that model I used to have a manual for every car I owned

TBF digital access and lookup is a far better solution for troubleshooting as opposed to gaining a holistic understanding of the car as an entity. It's more StackOverflow, less 'Inside Macintosh'.

More to the point, as cars evolve to digital control and signalling systems with associated firmware, the problems are increasingly diagnosed via the ODB or CAN-BUS and rectified at e.g. and Engine Management System level rather than at a mechanical level. This necessitates up-to-the minute sources of truth detailing the various firmware versions, caveats and advisories - much more suited to a digital medium and distribution channel.

The haynes manuals for newer stuff were generally trash but at least they provided information in the same format and order as every other haynes manual so they were useful for that.

I replaced the engine on my 1983 Ford Bronco in my driveway year ago. I wouldn't even consider it with a modern car.

Likewise, I found a studio tape recorder in a shop once (silver metal, so probably 80's or 90's era), it came with the manual which was mostly just electrical schematics so that you could both figure out exactly how it works, and figure out how to repair or replace components of it.

That's a fun analogy to think about. One side of it holds up: People don't know how to pop their hood now because they don't need to.

But on the other hand, cars before the 1990s were infinitely simpler to grok and to fix than modern vehicles. The learning curve was much gentler, and really no specialized knowledge was required. Changing the timing on your engine was easier than putting together an Ikea cabinet. Now it requires specialized equipment.

The opposite is true of computers. It has never been easier to snap together a cross-platform app to do almost anything than it is today. Friendly scripting languages, APIs for access to every kind of sensor and data imaginable, and devices fast enough to run terrible code at reasonable speeds. Almost everything you would have had to do from scratch hand in the 1980s has been done for you; a huge amount of coding now is just plug and play. And basically everyone in the first world has access to the necessary equipment to write their own code.

but for computers, it's the same

> People don't know how to pop their hood now because they don't need to.

you don't need to figure how to create your own note taking/list making/accountancy software, you just open your favorite/default search engine, write the query and get a plethora of options, for nearly any platform under the sun, because of all the work has already been done, as you pointed out in your last paragraph.

> It has never been easier to snap together a cross-platform app to do almost anything than it is today

Software engineering is weirdly harder today than it's ever been in many domains.

A cross platform app might have to support iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Android, Windows, Linux and the Web. Music and Video apps might additionally have to support various flavours of vehicle and TV platforms too.

On the server side your friendly scripting language will probably be running in a venv in a container on a VM on a cloud. Or potentially just a venv locally keeping the containerisation for the cloud.

Back in the day, emails could be sent from my computer to your computer if I knew your IP address. Nowadays my email won't get past your spam filters unless I buy and warm up a reputable domain on a respectable IP address and adhere to the correct content standards. The precise rules for these aren't documented anywhere.

> Back in the day, emails could be sent from my computer to your computer if I knew your IP address. Nowadays my email won't get past your spam filters unless I buy and warm up a reputable domain on a respectable IP address and adhere to the correct content standards. The precise rules for these aren't documented anywhere.

Funny enough, the ease of running a mail server and sending email back in the day is probably why it’s so scuffed these days. Email did hit a weird overcorrection though that never evened out, whereas everything else seemed to either standardize or die off (rip the days of telnet’ing into a random domain and being able to actually do things)

> now many people need to consult the manual to figure out how to pop their hood.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but auto manuals haven't included such technical information for close to two decades.

Are you sure on your timing?

Just asking coz whenever I try to talk about what computers could already do or when something was invented in the 1960s or 1970s I tend to start with "well 40 years ago..." and then I look at the calendar and notice that it's 2025 and I'm officially old now and 40 years ago was more like 60 years ago.

And my car in 2005 definitely had no such thing and it wasn't a 2005 model.

Just checked my 2024 Toyota Rav4 manual, I can confirm it is there.

Page 393.

https://cdn.dealereprocess.org/cdn/servicemanuals/toyota/202...

It's in a section called "do-it-yourself maintenance" that's pretty much entirely just topping off fluids. It doesn't even include instructions for replacing the battery.

I never thought about that, but it's true. My dad and every guy his age in my hometown can talk about cars nonstop. They'll go on for hours about changing the oil, messing with the transmission, or whatever (I don't know what they're saying--I'm a millennial and I'm used to vehicles that Just Work™).

Meanwhile, my friends and I can go on about the most banal computer stuff and my parents have no clue what we're talking about or why it's interesting to us. Kids probably don't either.

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